Cognitive Mode Studies In English Word-meaning Teaching

Vocabulary is the basis of all language skills and it is the indispensible backbone for the language system. The difficulty of English vocabulary learning lies on the learners’mastery of word-meanings, which is the base for language comprehension and expression. Word-meaning learning not just includes owning a powerful amount of vocabularies, and what’s more, it includes the particular grasp of word meaning items, i.e. the understanding of each item’s extension mechanism and the holding of the structure of the whole meaning items group. And this is of special importance to an English major student. Therefore, it is quite necessary to do further studies towards word-meaning teaching, for it is of great help to the exploration of language mystery and the promotion of English language teaching quality.Word-meaning teaching is a critical but difficult part of foreign language teaching, especially the polysemies parts which are always the "ghost" nagging both our teachers and students. English words meanings are actually complicated in the veil of simple feint. From the traditional research angle, the meanings of a certain word are interdependent with each other, and any two of them even with much less correlation. This kind of detachable analyzing method has brought a large perplex to our language teachers and learners. The teachers usually adopt the approaches that only illustrating those meaning items purely from its literal aspects and one by one, while the learners can merely memorize them like machines without knowing why so many items be classified into this category. The researchers both at home and abroad have already make certain in-depth studies from different perspectives and proposed many constructive methods and suggestions. Especially in the1980s, those studies had reached its prosperous peak. Nonetheless, little can help solving the problems of polysemies.Cognitive linguistics has put very different points of views. It holds that those meanings of words are developed step by step on the basis of people’s image schemas, and according to the metaphorical and metonymical mapping extension mechanism. This process is the need for people’s cognition. The reasons of former perplexes are the confusing of inner relations among those meanings. The traditional linear and plane teaching modes are not convenient for finding them, and thus lower the efficiency of our mastery of the word-meanings. From the view of cognitive linguistics, the word-meaning extensions are of rules, and not in puzzling disorder. Word-meaning teachings should obey these rules to its most extent, and grasp the cognition habit to optimize the memory mode to improve the memorizing effect.This thesis tries to set up a new word-meaning teaching mode, i.e. cognitive mode, which is on the base of cognitive linguistics theories and the standard of fitting the popular cognitive rules, thus it has realized the schematic representation of the inner relations of word-meanings. Through this kind of clear layers structures, we give the word-meanings a convenient flow diagram for memorization, which avail the learners to have a integral grasp of word-meaning relations, thus to learn English polysemies more efficiently.This thesis is mainly in use of qualitative research methods. It begins with the statement of the major theoretical background, including the prototype theory, image schema and metaphorical or metonymical mechanism, etc. Then it makes the detailed explanation of the specific research contents of this mode, which includes the evidence, approaches and requirements in each step. And it has also tentatively proposed some visualizing methods for displaying the relation diagrams, what’s more, the author has do some case words studies to demonstrate this teaching.Later, six suggestions of the implication of this mode in real practical teachings are recommended based on these demonstration analyses:emphasize the teaching of prototype and basic meaning items; emphasize the illustration of the deep meaning between different items; emphasize the cultivation of metaphorical awareness and abilities and consciously establish cognitive diagram for meaning learning, etc.Finally, it’s the conclusion of this thesis which follows the advantages and shortcomings. This mode can fit the people’s cognitive rules to the most extent that it has the greatest advantage and prosperous future. In view that this research is in short of empirical studies and vivid and meticulously case word studies, the author has proposed the anticipation and suggestions for further researches.